What failure taught me

“Winners are not afraid of losing but losers are. Failure is a part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.”

 Robert Kiyosaki

As confident as sayings like this sounds, it’s really not easy to believe. Who wants to fail? Embracing failure, or even doing something when we know there’s the possibility of failure is scary, at least for me, but I’ve come to realize why successful people make such ironic statements like that. It’s no play on words, truly our failures have in them the ability to develop us, educate us on a better way of doing things, and to make us wiser in our approach. Playing it safe by avoiding risks no doubt is safe, but in the long run unwise because risk taking propels us to potential.

During the course of my service year, I was opportune to work with a group of people on a community project. The good news is that we had a very wonderful idea, the other news is that we didn’t get it done. All we achieved as far as the project was concerned was a letter of approval from NYSC and the project proposal on our part. I was disappointed by the fact that we didn’t get it done, especially since it was so promising and I couldn’t get over the fact that I’d somehow failed myself. As much as it was a team work, I felt the pain of the letdown in a personal way, but I’m learning that the experience doesn’t have to be regretful. I spent some time thinking through what we did wrong and came up with the following.

When embarking on a project, team members should not be chosen solely on availability but on shared vision. Out of eagerness to get started on our dreams we sometimes fall victim to the I-know-you-and-think-you’re-okay syndrome, selecting team members because we want to be fair to them. What we don’t see is one person’s ability to jeopardize the whole thing when they don’t see what we see. Being committed to our vision should influence the kind of people that we invite to be a part of it. Ask important questions like do they see what I see? Are they as committed or willing to be as committed as I am? Do our goals align? Where it matters, are our values similar?  If we’re very clear on what we want to achieve- and it’s important that we clearly define the vision for ourselves and have a strong sense of what we want to achieve first before sharing it with others- we shouldn’t be hesitant to let go of people who don’t get it, people who are not as passionate about it as we are because much of the success of the vision is dependent on what the team makes out of it. What happens when we let anyone and everyone in? We will begin to be affected by their lack of enthusiasm. Spending time around them will encourage doubt in us. Procrastination will creep in, then we compromise without really meaning to until eventually, we share their lack of enthusiasm or impossibility mentality towards the project.

When working with more than one person towards achieving a dream, communication is very important. The way someone interprets a situation will be affected by his understanding, and in all likelihood different from another’s perception of it. What communication does is to merge both perceptions in a clear and concise manner for the whole team’s understanding. When we take communication lightly in a team, what we are doing is setting things in place for the loss of the essential part of our dream. Communication is also setting clear meeting time so that everyone is aware and able to get important information regularly. It is listening and saying, clarifying everyone’s understanding and assignment on the project. If only a select part of the team gets updated regularly on the latest information, the other members will feel that they’re not needed and ultimately back out of the project.

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Planning is a very key aspect of bringing our dreams to fruition. It is not enough to have the idea in our head, we have to strategically plan around what is available with respect to time, money, people, e.t.c. It’s always a good thing to dream, but we do ourselves no good when we fail to realistically look at how achievable they are. Sometimes we just have to defer them to another time. It should be noted too that planning has to be done on time. There’s a lot of implementation that will go on while the dream is being achieved, planning takes care of a possible headache that will be encountered during that process. Planning, thorough planning takes care of the process so that we enjoy a relatively smooth ride to our destination. We can’t always predict every hitch we will encounter, however, we will have tried to manage them as skillfully as possible.

I also learned that the level of our passion is directly proportional to the result we will get out of it. If our passion is lukewarm, we will get lukewarm results; if our passion is burning, we will generate outstanding results. Having a nice enough dream is good: wanting a good house, to live comfortably, etc. But how badly do we want these things? How much do we desire them? Successful people are people with results because they desire success passionately, at whatever cost to them, money or time. Most people, on the other hand, think that by wanting it somehow it will happen. No! It doesn’t work that way. That’s the reason why most people settle for being average, they don’t desire success with all their being. Think of when you were a student. How badly did you desire the first class? And how much did your result improve?

Stick-to-itiveness. That can only be because we determine that no matter the challenges we face, we’ll stick to our dreams. Alongside the passion that we carry for our dream, we have to carry a dogged determination to stay there. What happens when there is nothing around to encourage the dreams we carry in our hearts? When circumstances insist that somehow we can’t achieve the success that we desire? It is then that our commitment to stay until the end will sustain us. That’s why it’s important that from the very beginning we decide that our dream is what we want. Deciding beforehand commits us in the face of the strongest adversity. I’m not as disappointed now that I know what I did wrong, and yes, I have decided to apply all and more to produce success in my future endeavours.